Neither social nor personal responsibility, save who can

                                                    Capitalism brings us Debt and Poverty

Neither social nor personal responsibility, save who can 

 x Marcos Roitman Rosenmann: These are times of reflection. The consequences of being educated in selfishness, competitiveness and meritocracy surface with the stench of his teachings 

We live in capitalism, an order of domination and exploitation on which a culture is built whose values ​​no one is immune. It is a sick society. The symptoms speak of a general collapse. 

 Global warming, desertification, droughts, environmental pollution, famines and, if that were not enough, pandemics. Scientists attentive to the changes have invented a word, syndemic.

 The term unites two concepts: pandemic and synergy. Our Western civilization, which boasts of its disasters, suffers from pandemics such as obesity, malnutrition and climate change, which are joined by attractors that multiply their consequences, causing new diseases. We talk about social inequalities. Without attending to their causes, ignoring the warnings, the next syndicates are not far off. We are witnessing a crisis that affects not only the health system, it compromises the economic, social, political, ethnic, cultural and gender order. It unites sociological, historical and psychophysiological factors, which drags a condensation of human acts against nature, which have led the human species to a dead end. 

We are witnessing a concentration of great fortunes, the proportions of which are obscene. They are the result of consciously supporting hundreds of millions of people with starvation wages, without access to health, decent housing, education or healthy food, drinking water, electricity, labor rights or social. Nor to justice. Capitalism excludes them, marginalizes them and considers them failures. people who have not taken advantage of their opportunities. Unable to carve out a future. They have made bad decisions. No one but them is guilty, they must pay the consequences.

                                     Capitalism leads to exploitation

 The rich, their ideology tells us, have the right to their wealth, to enjoy it, they should not be ashamed. They have raised them with their effort, sacrifice and competing in a market that drives out the weak. In this equation, there is no mention of the corrupt morals inherent in capitalism, with a single rule of thumb, make the most of your opportunities to exploit, cheat and speculate. Aware of this other side of capitalism, those who amass billions end up creating foundations and propagating acts of philanthro-capitalism.

 Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Amancio Ortega, Larry Page or Sergey Brin owe nothing to anyone. They have achieved everything on personal initiative. Membership in a social class is irrelevant. They are enough and they are left over. But they are good people, they do charity. They donate digital material, sponsor the WHO, commit to green and digital agriculture, bridge the digital divide, sponsor endangered species and NGOs to fight pollution, hunger and exploitation. Surely they will buy vaccines against Covid-19 to offer them to the third world, when they are safe, of course. They evade taxes, keep their workers in conditions of overexploitation, with garbage jobs and temporary contracts, relocating production to employ children in Asian countries, maquilas or in the agro-industry of transgenic palm, soy or corn in Latin America. 

For them, as for governments and transnational companies, inequalities are nobody's responsibility. Some winners other losers. The latter are due to their low spirit of sacrifice. Irresponsible people who have not wanted to study or progress. Therefore deserving of scorn. Native peoples, immigrants, women forced to enslave themselves sexually enter this bag. They must accept their failure, obey and work for the benefit of those who employ them.

 Today, governments, in the midst of Covid-19, call on their citizens to be responsible; It has not to leave the house, to maintain the social distance, to use masks, to be prudent. They appeal to values ​​such as the common good, solidarity, the general interest. That is to say, what they have despised, ignored and consider a drag on private initiative, business profit and financial speculation. They have endorsed selfish behaviors, they have educated in meritocracy and competitiveness. But today they ask for responsibility.

 The same political elites, governments, businessmen and institutions (IMF, WB, WTO) that promote inequality, deduct the great fortunes, ask us for responsibility, which they have lacked when privatizing, dismantling the health and education systems public. Without forgetting that in this pandemic they have chosen to save the economy and not the people. Their example, irresponsibility, lies and the criminalization of democratic movements. It is not consistent or ethical.

However, against the current, the response of the working classes, indigenous peoples, feminism, has been exemplary in the face of the pandemic. They have acted with dignity, knowing that capitalism can only hope for someone who can. In it there is no room for social or personal responsibility. To sue it is hypocrisy, as much as the orgies, parties and transgressions that its leaders comment every day.  

The Day